Last month attendees around the world of the Global Microsoft Azure Bootcamp got a hands-on experience of what cloud technology can do—all on the same day.

It started as a modest idea—at least compared to what eventually occurred. Microsoft Azure MVPs Maarten Balliauw and Magnus Mårtensson suggested it would be cool if the community could organize a number of boot camps on the same day. The number they were thinking of was 10. The number that happened on April 27, 2013, was 94.

“It started a couple of MVP Global Summits ago,” recalled Microsoft Azure MVP Michael Wood, who, along with Microsoft Azure MVP Michael Collier, curates the Microsoft Azure Boot Camp program. “People started talking about it, getting interested in it, and then when everyone got together again for MVP Global Summit 2013, you could see the idea was going somewhere. But then Scott Guthrie (a corporate vice president in Microsoft’s Developer Division) mentioned it in his presentation, and the idea exploded.”

More than 80 MVPs jumped onboard to help organize the events, which featured 154 speakers in 194 sessions reaching an estimated 7,400 attendees.

“Typically people measure the power of a product or platform only based on its features. The Global Microsoft Azure Bootcamp has demonstrated that there is something additional to take into consideration: Community. The Global Microsoft Azure Bootcamp has been an event from the community to the community,” said Rainer Stropek, Austrian Microsoft Azure MVP and a bootcamp organizer.

Part of the event included a global rendering lab that was built on the Microsoft Azure platform. The lab was adapted from a demo Microsoft Azure MVP Alan Smith wrote in 2010. The lab allowed attendees from events all over the globe to participate and compete in rendering frames in a 3D animation. All the processing took place in a Microsoft Azure datacenter.

About 750 attendees from 50 locations in 22 countries took part in the lab. During the event a total of 9,904 worker role instances were started, with over 4,000 instances running concurrently for the second half of the event. There were 724,059 3D ray traced animation frames rendered with a total render time of 4 years, 184 days, 2 hours and 46 minutes. The overall compute time used by the 9,904 worker roles was almost 7 years. This all happened in just 26 hours, demonstrating architecting with the simple storage facilities is very stable within Microsoft Azure.

“Microsoft Azure platform provides services which might shift the Web to the next level. It is a platform for Web vNext,” stated Integration Microsoft Integration MVP Damir Dobric.